It’s entirely possible that the members of
Cincinnati’s The Kiss Me Everlasting are as skillful at acrobatics as
they are at music, given the juggling and wirewalking required to fit
the band into their hectic schedules.

Former Ruby Vileos vocalist/guitarist Ali
Edwards divides her time between work, school, her son and KME, while
former Ass Ponys drummer Dave Morrison (who also did time in Ruby
Vileos, among other projects) and bassist Max Bender (former four
stringer for Thee Shams and also a member of several other local bands)
perform similar balancing acts, juggling employment and personal lives
with the band’s gigging, writing and recording calendar.

Clearly, vocalist/guitarist Dan McCabe
walks the highest wire and keeps the greatest number of plates spinning
simultaneously. In addition to his Herculean (and yearlong) efforts to
wrangle the ever-growing annual MidPoint Music Festival in Cincinnati
into some semblance of order as the festival’s director, McCabe co-owns
and operates Over-the-Rhine club MOTR Pub and manages to maintain a
healthy family life. But he still manages to devote a fair amount of
time to The Kiss Me Everlasting, whose just-released self-titled debut
was a late entry in the packed field of the “Best Albums of 2012” derby.

One of the dominant features of KME, the
album and band, is the fascinating interplay between Edwards and McCabe
as vocalists and guitarists. Edwards somehow manages to sound ethereal
and earthy simultaneously, while McCabe’s instrument offers a gruff
tenderness reminiscent of Tom Waits in his early ’70s troubadour period.

“Ali has a very unique voice; I’m a
secondary unique voice,” McCabe says in MOTR’s basement. “I’ve been in
bands where those unique voices run parallel to unique instruments.
That’s why I’m excited about this record. It’s about the voices and how
they’re presented. It’s been a fun pursuit to build music around voices
with character that are distinctive and worth sticking up front.”

The Kiss Me Everlasting’s roots go back
to the dissolution of McCabe and Morrison’s last band, Campfire Crush,
nearly five years ago. (Along with his booking legacy at clubs like
Sudsy Malone’s, McCabe has also played in bands like Warehouse and
Roundhead.) KME morphed into existence in McCabe’s basement while
Campfire Crush experienced some personnel shifting.

“It was a transition from Campfire Crush
into this band. Things changed and these opportunities opened up. There
were two women in Campfire Crush, so when I was thinking about women
singers or musicians, I had my all time favorites and (thought) maybe a
certain person named Ali would want to come down and make some noise
with us. When the three of us were in the same room, I would consider
that the beginning of this band.”

Edwards’ arrival brought an interesting
dynamic to the nascent group’s creative process, which in turn
completely altered its trajectory.

KME solidified with the arrival of
Bender, which allowed the quartet to begin playing out with as much
frequency as everyone’s day-planners could accommodate. As the band’s
sonic identity became more pronounced, so too did the foursome’s
collective writing voice, as evidenced on KME’s stellar 11-track debut.
An Indie Pop-fueled amalgam of Velvet Underground and Jesus and Mary
Chain, KME feeds on the unique guy/girl harmonic tension that has
characterized modern Cincinnati icons like Over the Rhine and Wussy.
KME’s strong compositional skills combined with the intoxicating blend
of Edwards and McCabe’s voices make the band a formidable force.

After nearly half a decade of playing,
writing and refining, KME has amassed a voluminous catalog of material.
But when it came time to actually create a permanent document of that
material, some decisions had to be made.

So how does a band pick their favorite 11 “children” to represent them in the wider world for the first time?

“At the time we went into the studio,
those songs were the ones that we felt we had the strongest vision of
and were the most defined for all of us,” Edwards says. “We had pretty
low expectations, like ‘If we come away with three good demos, we’ll be
happy.’ And the debacle was that we came in and in a short amount of
time, came up with seven or eight very good sounding demos, and then we
went, ‘That sounds great, what are we going to do now?’ This was just
going to be this little EP thing. So we decided to go back and finish it
out.”

“And we put a couple of songs to death,”
McCabe says of the tunes that didn’t make the LP. “They don’t all
survive the scrutiny. We approach songwriting in a very fluid way. We
approach a song from (one) direction and then we’re like, ‘Fuck that,
what if …?’ “We have fun setting songs upside down and experimenting. We
don’t play out a lot, we play to ourselves. In that situation, we have
the luxury of saying, ‘It’s been that way for so long, fuck that …’
We’ll manhandle songs often. It’s a fun evolution in our basement. The
fun thing is the live experience is an evolution, as well.”

That deliberation is a hallmark of The
Kiss Me Everlasting’s creative process. The band didn’t hurry their
debut and, as McCabe noted, they don’t book an inordinate number of
shows around town merely for the sake of playing out. KME’s experienced
membership has a purposeful outlook on its career path and that will
continue into the foreseeable future.

“I don’t think anybody’s in this to get
in front of their adoring public so everyone sees them in a certain
light,” Morrison says. “That’s fun and healthy for a lot of people, but
for us, we were concentrating on the product the whole time. This record
represents five years of trying to find it. We took a lot of time and
spent a lot of money to make this record — not to make it great, just to
finish it and agree on what was good. And it was hard, because we’re
all employed and have children; we can’t even have this as our No. 1
vanity.”